Motivated Reasoning Without Awareness

Cornell University, Ithaca NY

Investigators

Abstract

Intriguingly, a growing body of empirical evidence suggests that people chronically and pervasively engage in motivated reasoning yet remain largely unaware that they are doing so. People engage in motivated reasoning whenever they bend their thinking about themselves and their social world toward conclusions they favor and away from those they do not. Such conclusions might be that one is a lovable and capable individual, or that one's future prospects are rosy ones, or that one's surrounding world presents only minimal risk or threat. Motivated reasoning goes by many names -such as wishful thinking or rationalization- and has been shown to be prime contributor to unrealistic and overly optimistic conclusions that people reach about themselves and their prospects. This proposal includes 13 laboratory experiments designed to assess how people engage in motivated reasoning without awareness of it. As such, it constitutes a new direction and extension of the PI's previous work on the psychological processes that underlie motivated reasoning, and potentially provides an answer as to why people often fail to recognize the distorted and overly optimistic nature of their beliefs. In particular, the proposal suggests that the processes underlying motivated reasoning "hide" in three different "locations" that lie outside conscious awareness. As such, if people consciously monitor or review how they reach their conclusions, they will find little introspective trace of motivated distortion in their thinking. The research proposed here is designed to add to our theoretical knowledge by addressing how people can engage in wishful thinking and motivated distortion yet remain unaware that they are doing so.